Is there anyone that forum members can turn to if they are having problems with the forums, or if they see something which they think might have been posted by someone who might not have the community’s best interests at heart?
Or, to put that another way, who can we turn to for help?
Is there really no-one who can help when someone needs moderator assistance?
Hello Garry, I have never perceived this place to be moderated by anyone. I’ve been visiting rarely over the last few years. I think the Reddit sub is better moderated. There is not very much traffic here but most of what I’ve seen has been on-topic.
Edit: it seems that @reedcopsey might be some kind of forum administrator at least.
If there aren’t any moderators then that would be a real shame, and a concern.
It feels to me like these official F# community forums, and the members in them, have been ‘discarded’ by the people who I would expect to be making sure that the forums are a trusted part of the F# ‘ecosystem’ - something upon which people can rely.
It makes me worry about the future of these forums if the people in charge of the language don’t seem to care about them.
I raised a similar sentiment now 4 years ago.
It is a strange fact that programming with F# is such a lonely experience. Many who try it fall in love, but there is no real sense of community. The current F# maintainers seem to be doing a good job. We will have nullable references support soon. They could have been more active here, though. Perhaps share their progress to make it easy for us F# fans to follow along. Luckily our tireless Sergey Tihon is our hero!
Maybe flagging the posts as spam will help?
Unfortunately I can see that the fact that these forums see so little ‘action’ (maybe a couple of posts a week) could be used as ‘fuel to the fire’ for various – thankfully incorrect – statements that F# is no longer an active language, which could discourage people from learning it.
One (false) argument being along the lines of: “If the official forums for the language have been ‘abandoned’ then the language must have been abandoned too.”
I can understand the comment by cartermp, in your linked thread, about the forums being created for something specific to start with and that they simply didn’t expand much beyond that initial usage, but it’s still a bit disappointing that people have to go somewhere other than the F# community forums to get involved with the ‘F# community’ (whatever that may be).
I’ve flagged the posts that I think have some content which I think may be inappropriate. (Unfortunately I didn’t find the part of the ‘form’ I could use to explain my reasoning until I’d almost finished flagging.) Hopefully there will be someone who can appraise them properly.
Some surprising/saddening/shocking/disheartening/worrying [delete as appropriate] statistics are that even though I have only created 41 topics, and replied only 90 times, I am the all-time number 2 highest poster in both regards, and I’ve only been a member of the forums for less than 3 years. People can read whatever they want into that.